


Haematomancy

by heavenbows



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 03:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14035212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenbows/pseuds/heavenbows
Summary: May the good blood guide your way. She can’t completely restrain her amusement, though she muffles her laughter into the dead man’s scarf around her neck and he, Alfred, the innocent, takes it for a cough.





	Haematomancy

_ May the good blood guide your way _ . She can’t completely restrain her amusement, though she muffles her laughter into the dead man’s scarf around her neck and he, Alfred, the innocent, takes it for a cough.

 

He offers her a handkerchief, the small square of fabric startlingly white and clean against the grimy, bloodsoaked streets she has already grown so used to.

 

“We can’t lose our manners entirely, can we?” he asks with a wry smile, interpreting surprise more easily than amusement. “Go on, take it. It’s a handkerchief, not your death.”

 

No, but it could so easily be  _ his _ death. In a city where men and women become beasts on the flip of a coin, and when the shadow of a hat brim or a scarf pulled across a jaw can conceal so much, it strikes her as flagrant foolishness to be so charitable. Close enough to touch is close enough to kill. The thought burns so strongly that it almost becomes temptation, but she takes the handkerchief and stows it in the pocket of her coat, balling it in her palm.

 

“Thank you,” she says, belatedly. Alfred starts slightly at her voice, no doubt wondering how he overlooked the fact he was talking to a woman.

 

She half wants to explain that this, at least, is no fault of his own naivete, and she is not offended by the mistake. Such an explanation, however, would no doubt circle back to the question of why she was wearing a corpse’s stolen garments in the first place, which -- well, she doesn’t have an answer for that, herself. She stinks of blood and beasts and death, Yharnam sinking into her skin.

 

It is an odour that will never wash out. Already, no matter how often she awakens in a dream of snowy white flowers, she suspects that whatever miracle now reprieves her, be it the work of gods or men, will not last. Already, she has killed a family; with tardiness, with hasty words, with her own two hands. She has killed a friend in necessity painted as mercy.

 

She will not linger to find out how she will kill Alfred, too.

 

With a curt nod, she turns and leaves. If she passes this way again it will not be to see this knight in gleaming white. She will not lay down her weapons and trade tales as if they are comrades-in-arms by a roaring fire, no matter how cheerfully he calls after her retreating back.

 

The night is young, and she has not yet entirely decided how to spend it; whether to continue idly wandering the streets and killing any beasts she comes across, or whether to tug and worry at the corners of… of what, she does not know.  _ Conspiracy _ seems too strong a word right now, but there is a sense of something casting its long shadow over Yharnam.

 

She whistles a tune through dry, cracked lips. Both options seem a waste, in their own way, if she really will die before the night is out. Should she make the most of the time she has left, or is it a farce to go chasing answers she will never have the time to make use of?

 

The streets are wet, as if it has just rained, though it hasn’t. Are these puddles of blood, instead? She glances down, but it’s too dark to tell. Too dark even to see her own reflection, save as the murkiest of outlines.

 

She raises her gaze again and looks down the street, her whistling subsiding into humming.

 

_ May the good blood guide your way _ .

 

A savage smile takes over her lips. Alfred is an innocent, but perhaps he isn’t entirely soft in the head. Whether the blood is good, bad, or indifferent is no concern of hers… but if she follows the blood she finds, maybe it will give her a path of some kind to travel through this night. Maybe the blood in her own veins will look for its kin, now she has a little Yharnam blood of her own.

 

Once more, she chuckles into Gascoigne’s scarf.

 

Let it not be said that Yharnamites are liars.


End file.
